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Quiting my J.O.B

My wake-up call came in October 2016 when I was diagnosed with a DVT (fancy way of saying blood clot) in my leg. Now, one would think my wake-up call would have come with my cancer diagnosis or the following year being hospitalized for 8 days with POTS and then being sent home with an oxygen tank for the next 2 months, or the year after that learning I was allergic to about 80% of the foods I was eating on a regular basis. Nope. The last straw for me was the blood clot. I felt like my body was a complete mess.

Rewinding a bit - just 4 weeks after my mastectomy I landed my dream job as a project manager for one of the top strategic operations improvement firms in DC. (I was still wearing my surgical bra when I interviewed for this job! But I digress…) I was responsible for managing a number of projects being produced by some of the brightest people I had ever met. I was on my way to making it big!

Being surrounded by top industry minds carried with it a level of intensity that I had never before experienced. There was a significant amount of pressure, and I pushed myself to work around the clock to prove myself. I wanted to climb the corporate ladder and one day get into the C-class – what I thought was the epitome of success.

What I didn’t realize was that for the 2 years I worked in this environment, my body was basically breaking down and the stress of trying to make my hamster wheel go faster than other people’s hamster wheels was taking a serious toll. When the blood clot manifested, I decided that enough was enough. I was finally forced to truly examine what I was doing, how I was treating my body and mind, and evaluate whether or not I could, or wanted to, sustain that way of life. My body had clearly been trying to tell me something and I finally heard the message loud and clear!

Ultimately I concluded, in order to take control of my health, I needed to take control of my life. So, I took the plunge and quit my job to regroup, recover, and focus on reversing some of these medical issues. It’s been a year now, and I’m continuing to see remarkable improvements on the health front, which has contributed to realizing and pursuing my passion and dream of giving back to, and positively impacting, the medical community that I relied upon through my cancer diagnosis and treatment. Leaving the corporate world was definitely a tough and scary decision but it has set me on a path in which I put my wellbeing and happiness first and that, I’ve learned, is the true meaning of success.